Humaira Mubeen brings a bowl of chips from the kitchen and places them on the table next to the salsa. She turns to face four large, connected rooms: One with a pool table, one with snacks, one with a kitchen, and one with a TV. It’s 8 o’clock. People are late.

A few minutes pass and people start pouring in. Some men, some women, some wearing brightly colored headscarves, as the Islamic religion suggests, but in unique and interesting ways. The rooms fill up with young Muslims who don’t know each other, yet speak as if they were friends. The rooms are full of Mipsterz.

“I’m here to support Mipsterz. I think it’s a really, really cool group that gets together Muslims of all kinds. I think it’s a way for people to get to know each other. I think it’s an outlet, and it’s very creative,” says 23-year-old Hisham Yousif, as he straightened out his t-shirt with “MIPSTERZ” written across the bottom. He’s at a Mipster Meet up, a mingling of Mipsterz from different cities gathered in Washington D.C. on February 22. It’s a meeting meant for introducing Mipsterz who had prior been pen pals of sorts online.

“It brings people together of different ethnicities who all have some semblance or sort of practice of Islam,” Yousif says.

Mipsterz are Muslim hipsters. According to Mipsterz themselves, a Mipster can be anyone… but a common thread remains. Mipsterz must have ties to Islam – usually as a first generation child. Mipsterz take their religious lives at home, fraught with old world traditions on principles like marriage, clothing and education. They mesh it with their new world ideas adopted in the society of their family’s new home to form a third culture: Mipster culture.

A YouTube video posted in December 2013, named “Somewhere in America,” featured a group of young Muslim women. They were Hijabi – women who wear hijabs, the traditional veil – but in every other way they struck a thoroughly secular and modern pose: They skateboarded around, drank out of goblets in cars, posed with funky shades, all to the tune of a Jay Z song. The girls in the video were Mipsterz.

The video took off over the next few months, with over 400,000 views. From it’s popularity emerged Abbas Rattani, a producer of the video, as an authority on Mipster culture.

“A Mipster is someone who… is trying to be themselves in a world that’s constantly trying to make them into somebody else,” said Rattani, producer of the ‘Somewhere in America’ video. “Jay Z famously said ‘can I live?’ You know? And I think that’s what I think people are just trying to do with Mipsterz or in Mipsterz, is they’re just trying to live, or they’re just trying to be themselves, while everybody’s trying to sort of tell them how they should or shouldn’t be.”

The group is ever-expanding, with a Facebook page, a Google group, and “Mipster Meet Ups” – organized meetings of the minds of Mipsterz all over the world. Here, they have a self-made community where they can fully express themselves in terms of their artistic world, academics and religion and feel that they belong.

At least, that’s what Mipsterz means to Humaira Mubeen. A 24 year old Hijabi Pakistani American college graduate living near Washington D.C., Mubeen saw a problem with the way her traditional Pakistani community approached marriage, and she and a few other Mipsterz decided it was time for a change. Mubeen said that normally, parents are heavily involved in the marriage process, and that Hipster Shaadi is more about the individual youth and his or her personality.

“We do want parents involved to a certain extent, but it’s more about who you are. Other sites… your parents go into Shaadi.com, and when we were doing our initial research on this, [users] wrote their skin complexion. Their height. Very superficial things that didn’t really tell you about who the person was,” said Mubeen, “it was like you’re selling a product.”

“On our site, you actually see a human being for who they actually are versus a product: what most people look like on other sites that their parents have most likely signed them up for.”

Hipster Shaadi is a matchmaking site created by Mubeen and a team of Mipster friends, identified on Hipster Shaadi’s website as Hassan, Ali and Shereen. Users can create a profile listing their location and interests, and the moderators match them up with other users who share in those interests. The population of the site is nl young, and mostly female… something unexpected from a matchmaking site associated with Islam. Mubeen uses the case of Shaadi.com as an example – an older Islamic matchmaking site she says is used mostly by men to find second marriages or open relationships. On Hipster Shaadi, a woman – regardless of how religious she is – can pursue a relationship with a man.

“Everybody has the opportunity to express interest in someone else, and I think that’s how it should be,” said Mubeen

Since its creation in the winter of 2013, Hipster Shaadi has attracted over a thousand people, with about 1,800 profiles. The idea for Hipster Shaadi came about through a discussion with other Mipsterz, and is a prime example of the kind of work Mipsterz laud. Mubeen and her team addressed the issues within their religious community in regards to marriage, and interjected them with fresh, new ideas to form a brand new blend of two cultures. A third culture.

That’s what being a Mipster is all about, and among other Mipsterz, Mubeen feels at ease.

“It just felt really nice to know there were other people out there that existed like me that were going through the same struggles, facing the same problems, had these different identities that they had to balance. And the fact that I could connect with them and talk to them about these issues made me think more, made me want to learn more and become more social and meet new people. And it just makes me reflect more on myself and my life and what I want from it.”

But there are those who think that the rhythmic beats of a Jay Z song don’t mesh well with the prayers echoing within a mosque. Omer Bajwa, a Muslim chaplain at Yale University, says that Mipsterz aren’t representing Islam and the headscarf in a respectful way.

“If your M.O is to be edgy and provocative and sensationalist, well then they achieved what they were trying to do. Is that how you make substantive change in communities? No. I don’t think so

Bajwa thinks the song choice, the dancing and the representation of the headscarf are all wrong in the “Somewhere in America” video. He also believes that Mipsterz aren’t a rising trend, and are simply a group of kids who have no other way of expressing themselves.

“At some level you have people, for whatever reason they feel that their voice is not heard. And they want to produce – if that’s what was trying to be done – they wanted to produce this as a way of highlighting their voice.”

Still, it’s hard to deny that Mipsterz are growing. According to a 2011 Pew Research study, 15 percent of American Muslims are second-generation Americans – the stated target of Mipster movement. The Mipsterz Facebook page has over 8,000 likes.

But some think that the Mipsterz trend is simply reflective of another, more obvious trend – the growth of the Muslim youth population. Hamdan Azhar is a Mipster who is self-critical of the work he and his peers have done.

“I think the Mipster community is a manifestation of a trend within the Muslim community, within the Muslim –American community, within just modern young people who are trying to understand their identity,” he said, “and I think Mipsterz is one manifestation of that.”

Azhar, quite simply, said he doesn’t get the hype. To him, the media fixation is troubling.

“Just because you have an image in your head of what you expect Muslims to be and then a video comes out showing you that’s not the case, you’re like, Oh my God,’ ” Azhar said. “That’s the first time YOU discovered that Muslims are as American as anyone else! It doesn’t mean it’s breaking news. We’ve been here. We’ve known it. I didn’t wake up that day and [say], ‘Oh my God, there are Muslims who speak English and dress nicely and look cool!’ I look in the mirror every day and I see that.”

For some young Muslims, like Humaira Mubeen, identifying as a Mipster helps with finding a sense of unity and identity. For others, like Sobia Masood, the term Mipster is just confusing.

Masood is an 18-year-old fashion blogger who attends FIT in New York City. She considers herself a “Hijabinista,” a Hijabi fashionista. With almost 5,000 followers on Instagram, Masood has a heavy following. She has all the makings of a Mipster: a first generation American who fuses religion and her own ideas to create something new. But she doesn’t consider herself one –in fact, she’s heard of the hype, but still doesn’t even really understand what a Mipster is.

“It’s just kind of like a very vague and broad concept, … I don’t even know what type of beliefs and values [they have], she said

Masood’s blog has gotten the attention of companies all over the world, including Popinjay in Pakistan, a site dedicated to handmade goods that recruited her as an ambassador for one of their handbags.

She recently started wearing a headscarf, and said she has to balance her religion and the fashion world. However, like Azhar, she believes it’s a new term for an old phenomenon. Masood says she has her own sense of identity and style, and didn’t need the help of a group like Mipsterz to find it.

“The definition of Mipster has always been something kind of inside all of us, but it’s now a matter of labeling it.”

But still, to those who accept the label, the Mipster community can feel like home.

“We have so many different identities and sometimes its very easy to get trapped into one, and I feel like, this is something a lot of us struggle with,” Mubeen said. “We’re just trying to find that center where we can be all those identities and not sacrifice one or the other because of who we want to be.”